In September 2017, the London-based makerspace and think tank Machines Room, together with a research group at the Royal College of Art called Distributed Everything, presented the impactful exhibition A New Normal. It highlighted actual use-cases of people who are making products for a world beyond mass-production, utilising the possibilities of decentralised, digitally supported and shared fabrication.

For MakeCity Festival 2018 and supported by the British Council, Vitra, Machines Room London, Fab Lab Berlin and weißensee kunsthochschule berlin revisit the topic, by looking at the intersection of the future of production and labour — in the metropolitan area of Berlin and beyond. Managers and researchers from various backgrounds such as Raphael Gilgen (Vitra), Nat Hunter (Machines Room London), Christiane Sauer (weißensee kunsthochschule berlin) and Daniel Heltzel (Fab Lab Berlin) will exchange ideas with the event's participants about how new technologies and changing social habits are transforming our work spaces, objects of work, and ways of working.

For the first time, the freshly founded Textile Prototyping Lab (TPL) Berlin will open it's doors with a pop-up-version of Germany’s first openly accessible textile prototyping studio for developing cutting edge textile products. The TPL is a BMBF-funded research project that aims at bringing individual designers, research institutes and established companies from the textile industry closer together.